While building the new version of this website, we had a lot of tedious tasks that we gladly wanted to outsource to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tooling like ChatGPT. This was true both for the technical side (Nan plans to do a full reveal there in a future blog) and for the content. For the latter, it was my first time seriously working with AI tooling. This is what I found.

Member since

When you look at the Community Page, you see an option to sort by “Joined”. It will show you the community members in order of when they signed up. This is a new feature.

We only actively started registering the sign-up date in 2017, so we had to gather additional data to give credit to the hundreds of early users who have been with us since around 2005. We used ChatGPT to create a script to crawl through all the old community index pages in the Wayback Machine to see where the first occurrence of a member's name was.

It ended up with a pretty good list – the dates may be off by 3 months or so, but the order is fairly correct. I carefully …

So we have been ‘live’ for a week now with the fully refurbished version of this website, survived the WHC 2025 as the ultimate crash test and conducted a global sociological experiment on “dealing with change”.

The reviews are steadily flowing in again. And you do well in adding full-size photos to be used on the website. For the latter, please make clear in the title which site it represents – “icebergs” alone will not do it, and neither does “IMG_008”. Do “Vienna” or “Vienna Coffee House”.

We understand that there is a learning curve to get to know the new website. And, because in this stage there are still bugs here and there, it can be hard to know what it is supposed to do. We will keep on working on fixing these issues and smoothing the effects of some radical choices. For “How to’s” and the status of the main issues/features/plans, read the F.A.Q’s which will be regularly updated:

• FAQ General: logging in, managing your content, generic questions
• FAQ Adding Photos
• FAQ Counting your visits
• FAQ Maps

Over the past weekend, we gained 26 new sites on the World Heritage List, and 2 sites were extended. You can find all decisions here, on our fancy new session page. Find below some aspects that warrant a closer look.

A turning point has crossed

Possibly, we have witnessed the final tipping point, where no member dared or wanted to express opposing views against other member states anymore. As Durian stated at the Forum, the WHC lacked a "strong rule keeper". The delegates of Lebanon (he must have been present 20 times already) and India do have the knowledge and experience to be one, but they choose to use their arrows selectively. So Lebanon applauds the UAE and scolds poor Nepal.

Rejection advice overturned

We saw the rare occurrence of a site, that had been advised to Not to be Inscribed by ICOMOS, to be overturned by full consensus to be Inscribed: Faya Palaeolandscape (UAE). This, despite a gentleman’s agreement a few years ago that those would be withdrawn by the State Party before the session. It was accompanied by a nasty rant by Qatar towards ICOMOS, which came down to “you don’t understand anything about our region”.

…

I am so happy to present to you today the fully refurbished version of this website. A new design, a new back-end, lots of additional pictures and new pieces of content.

Why?

This is already a rather old website; the domain was registered on July 31, 2000. Since then, it has continued to expand, with ever more content created by significantly more members. Today, we have almost 2000 active users, 82000 page views a month, 10808 reviews, and nearly 15,000 images. All the time, the technical back end of the website essentially stayed the same as when it was my private blog: a mostly self-coded website.

We had been working on a new version centered around a true content management system (CMS) on and off for the better part of seven years. It had been clear for a while that CMS features would benefit this site significantly and that many wishes for improvements were not possible in the legacy setup. But COVID, our travels, and the massive amount of data to migrate were insurmountable obstacles.

Then two things happened:

• In 2024, our hosting provider for a decade terminated our contract as we were crashing their servers due to the load. …

Every morning around 11 a.m. I do a quick check of this direct link to see whether UNESCO has registered any new Tentative Sites. When they do, I try to add the new records to our website as quickly as possible as well. The people in Paris rarely update before 11 a.m., and afternoon changes only occur when they have a lot to add. The Tentative Sites, for some reason, do not appear in chronological order – sometimes they post things that have been submitted months before. Let’s have a closer look at what the crop of the first half of 2025 brought us.

The Numbers

I have written about the trends in Tentative Sites before, trying to determine The Value of a TWHS . So does the first half of 2025 confirm this pattern?

At the time of writing (June 28, 2025), all Tentative Lists combined add up to 1778 sites. In the first half of 2025, 49 new Tentative Sites were added. 9 of those were 1-on-1 replacements of earlier ones. An additional 15 TWHS were removed and became Former TWHS.

49 new ones in the first half of the year are significantly above average, as are the …

Kenya almost killed me. The murder attempt actually was done by a Kenyan goat, which, while I was walking the streets of Old Mombasa (pictured below), decided to make a run for its freedom and jumped down to street level from a balcony. Its hoof bruised my hand black and blue, but it could as well have landed on my head. It must have been an absurd scene to watch, but the Kenyans aren’t disturbed by a bit of chaos and unpredictability.

Still want to go? Here are some tips for travelling to Kenya as a WH Traveller.

1. Be flexible

Kenya overall is an easy country to travel in: they’re used to tourists, almost everybody speaks English and is willing to help you out (often hoping there’s a little extra in it for them, but not pushing for it). But it certainly doesn’t run like clockwork: departure times of all my 3 domestic flights and the international flight were changed significantly at least once, access to a site that was granted can be revoked for vague reasons (see my Kaya Kauma story), I had an airport transfer who didn’t know how to get to the airport, etc. So be …

The Community Perspective of our Mount Kenya site page only states: “This site requires an up-to-date review.” – I have hinted at it already several times, wondering how a site that has been ticked by 63 members has only had one, tiny review dating back to 2006. I would guess that 90% of the “visits” here were drive-by ones. Even then, the mountain, with its characteristic rugged, glaciated peaks, isn’t always easy to see, as it is often covered in clouds. This is the best I could get, at 7 in the morning from the pool area of my lodge:

Mount Kenya is known for its several vegetation bands with Afro-alpine flora from the base to the peak. I stayed for 3 nights at the Naro Moru River Lodge , a little oasis outside of the park borders, where you can experience the vegetation and wildlife of the lower regions of the mountain at 1,970m altitude. At night, you may hear the screaming of the tree hyraxes, and during the day, you’ll find many birds typical for the region (the lodge’s bird list includes a significant number of 399 species). The Cinnamon-chested bee-eaters put on a …

The Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests along the East Coast of Kenya comprise former fortified settlements ( kayas ) in an undisturbed forest setting, which still fulfill a sacred role in the belief of Mijikenda peoples. It's such a messy WHS: it is what you get after an AB overrule where the documents haven’t been adjusted to the final decision. When I started preparing for my June 2025 visit, I found out that we had its site history and name (it starts with “Sacred”) all wrong, a rare occurrence nowadays. Originally, it had 36 locations, now there are 8 according to the map section at the UNESCO website, but that’s an error also. Kaya Kinondo was explicitly excluded in the inscription decision . I have alerted the UNESCO WH Bureau to the mistake, but never got a reply and the error persists.

Instead of Kaya Kinondo, which is an easy-to-access site just outside the popular beach resort of Diani Beach, I had to find another Kaya suitable for a visit. All remaining Kayas lie north of Mombasa, so that city or one of the northern coastal towns, such as Watamu, are the best bases. Kaya Kauma stood …

While preparing for my upcoming Kenya trip, I was studying the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest (part of the Coastal Forests of Kenya TWHS ). It turns out that they are looking towards a nomination , but estimate that they would need 100k-300k USD to complete it (and subsequently wondered how they would get access to so much money). The nomination dossiers have also been addressed in the WHC 2025 documents that were published this week, where a change of the format is considered for a myriad of reasons, including "to promote possibly shorter and less costly nomination dossiers".

Maybe it’s time to have a closer look at those Nomination Dossiers (I wrote about Incomplete Dossiers before).

History of the Nomination Dossier

The nomination dossier, as we now know it as an extensive glossy brochure, came into existence in 1998. After the first years of WHS, an overall need to get a grip on several aspects of the nomination process grew. In 1996, a fixed format for nominations was decided upon. That format is mostly still in use, although more specific questions are now being asked about risk preparedness, indigenous peoples, financial resources, etc.

When we look at a few examples of nomination …

We’ve seen quite a lot of new members to our WH Community over the past year, and I have noticed that it can be hard to find your way around the website as a newbie. The main thing to understand is that this is a community-based website that is driven by Community Contribution . There’s no hidden, paid team behind the scenes that creates all the content. Even the technical side is supported purely voluntarily.

You can contribute to any subject where your expertise or interest lies, and any amount of time is fine. Ways in which you can participate include:

1. Create a User Profile

To become a registered member, it is as simple as creating a user profile . To be shown in Our Community list of members , you will then need to add the number of World Heritage Sites (WHS) you have visited via Update your count. You can use a nickname, but we don’t allow anonymous contributions.

With this account, you’re also eligible to rate the quality of the WHS and Tentative Sites (TWHS) you have visited, which will be reflected in the ‘quality scores’ these sites have. Also, you will be able to vote …